Pyromania
by truhekili
Summary: Season 4. Addison returns; Alex has a question for her. Just my latest ADDEX fit of denial. I own nothing.


Pyromania

Addison Forbes Montgomery Shepherd believed in Karma. She wasn't religious, not formally, and she didn't worry much that an angry God might punish her infidelities. But Karma was more like gravity than divinity, a universal constant who always claimed Her due. Karma also had a wicked sense of humor, and delighted in Her work – which is why Addison Forbes Montgomery Shepherd nearly jumped out of her Jimmy Coos, when Karma came knocking on her door.

For his 7th Christmas, Alex Karev asked Santa Claus for an axe and some boots. He never got them; he never expected to. He wrote the letter because his mother insisted, because she wanted him to believe in something. Besides, he wanted to be a fire fighter when he grew up. But Alex doubted that anyone who didn't already live there even knew where Iowa was. Almost twenty years later, he believed in even less than he had as a kid. He'd long ago forgotten the letter, or even that he'd once wanted to be a firefighter. But Karma never forgets, and She cackled wildly as she watched him writhing in the grips of a raging pyromania.

Addison Forbes Montgomery Shepherd said nothing as she hesitantly opened her hotel room door, motioning for him to enter. He brushed past her lightly, his familiar scent surrounding her. She'd returned to Seattle barely twelve hours before, for a visit, for a consult, as a favor to Richard Webber, her mentor. She glanced at Alex nervously, trying to read him. But that, she remembered, was like trying to read Braille with chop sticks. Even his face was a maddening enigma: from one angle, chiseled, mature, rugged, from another angle, soft, young, almost innocent. Karma giggled at that piece of Her handiwork: Alex Karev was anything but innocent.

But he was standing in front of her, again, and Addison Forbes Montgomery Shepherd's – no, Addison Forbes Montgomery's - very name mocked her. This was not part of the plan. She had married Derek, stable, predictable Derek; they'd spent a decade together doing predictable, stable things. She'd planned on a lifetime. She'd promised him a lifetime. She'd never planned to fall madly in love with the predictably uncommitted and unstable Mark Sloan. She'd never admitted to anyone – not to Mark, not to Derek, not even to herself – that Mark had been her first great love. Derek had been the right man, the proper man for her name and her aspirations, but Mark was always who she wanted. Karma saw that, and another perverse conspiracy was set in motion.

Alex stood rooted in place, his eyes fixed on hers as if daring her to speak first. His crooked tie was damn near strangling him, and he couldn't quite feel his limbs. He willed his hands to quit trembling and his eyes to maintain her gaze. He hoped she didn't see it, any of it, but he knew that everything about him screamed survivor, and he hated that.

He'd outlasted his childhood; he'd learned to fight, and he'd scored a scholarship. He'd never been the best athlete, or the smartest kid in the class, or even very popular; he scraped through medical school, and scratched and clawed to keep his place in a choice surgical residency. But he survived.

He'd even told Addison, once, indirectly, that that was all you had to do to over come a nightmare childhood. He'd lied then, just like he did when he told her he wasn't interested in her. The truth was, she was all he thought about.

He'd been protecting her, he told himself, like he had his mother, and his sister. But nothing ever went as he planned: So, he ran off his mother's abusive bastard of a husband, and she drank herself to death in his absence; he ran off his sister's abusive bastard of a father, and she spiraled faster into her last overdose. He still tried to believe, sometimes, that his sister's death had been an accident.

But he did stop planning – anything. Karma was intrigued.

Addison Forbes Montgomery Shepherd stood almost motionless, studying Alex's exasperating, brooding, enthralling eyes. She'd given up trying to ascertain even their true color, which danced perpetually from hazel to brown to amber to golden to a thousand other nameless hues, varying with the lighting, with his mood, maybe even with the weather for all that she could tell. Like everything else about him, his eyes were mercurial.

She couldn't remember now why he'd once reminded her of Mark, Mark and his jovial blue eyes, his easy smile, his sunny exuberance, which intoxicated her like dry champagne. Addison had always loved Mark's eyes, and she waded gratefully into them as she fled her dying marriage. Karma saw it all, saw her set the corpse of her marriage ablaze as she fled into Mark's embrace, and saw her shrink from its ashes whenever he touched her now.

Mark resuscitated her when she was suffocating in the grips of the right man. But she was Addison Forbes Montgomery Shepherd, who planned everything, who knew all the social fineries, who obeyed all the rules. She was a renowned surgeon, married to a renowned surgeon, with a house in the Hamptons and a Brownstone in the only city that mattered.

She was a born aristocrat, and the plan went perfectly, until Mark. She could never plan with Mark, or for Mark, or even against Mark. He mocked her rules at every turn - except that now he was buried in them, or by them, crushed under the weight of her guilt. She could no longer ignore the taste of regret on her lips when she kissed him; she could no longer cordon off the electric blue of his eyes from Derek's lighter azure, or dampen the echoes of Derek's voice whenever Mark spoke her name. She'd told Callie once that her problem with Mark was that she could see no future with him. The truth was, she saw that future vividly, an endless reminder of her failure.

And Addison Forbes Montgomery Shepherd had never failed at anything.

Alex watched her intently, half wondering if she was groping for words or just waiting for him to make a fool of himself, again. He was good at that, well, at that, and at making people mad at him. He told them that that was his thing, that he was a truth teller. He'd even told Burke once that that was all he had going for him, and that he'd never let anyone take that away from him.

Except that Addison had taken it; her, he'd lied to.

Karma never missed a trick.

The truth was, he knew that truth was over-rated. People didn't want it, didn't need it, they even ran from it. They told all kinds of lies, to protect themselves, their friends, their families, their reputations, even their own delusions. But Alex had nothing worth lying to protect, not until her flaming red hair engulfed him. Until then, it was just easier to tell the truth, because no one listened to him anyway, and the truths he told usually made no damn difference to anything.

But they did keep people away. Truth tellers are invisible; people are so defensive around them that they never look at them. Keeping out of sight is important if you're a kid who needs to be invisible to a parent's rage; it still works when you're an adult, and would rather be unseen than seen for what little you are.

But that was the problem with Addison Forbes Montgomery; she had seen him. Karma noticed.

Addison Forbes Montgomery tried to speak, tried to will her trembling legs to move. She'd only ever wanted, really wanted, one man before, and she ended up hating herself, and half-hating Mark, at least every other Tuesday, for making her want him, and then hating herself more for ever half-hating him.

Karma was a bitch.

And Alex wasn't Mark. He was arrogant and largely indifferent to her rules, like Mark. But he was also unpredictably sweet and uncertain, and he always seemed to see right through her. He saw everything, this infuriatingly unpredictable ex-intern of hers. He saw her when she was not being Addison Forbes Montgomery, when she was tired of being Addison Forbes Montgomery. He noticed when she just stopped planning, and when her sheer effort to sustain the appearance of effortless perfection went up in smoke. And he didn't flinch. Not even when he was standing inches in front of her.

"Addison," he said softly.

Her touch was electric; he almost gasped as his lips melted into hers.

He'd told her before she'd left that he wasn't interested. He lied because she wanted a future, and survival was all that he knew, and survival was all about the present. He lied because, as much as he wanted her, she also wanted him, and no one had ever wanted him before - not his friends, not his family, not even Izzie, no one. He was leftovers, three day old pizza, and Addison Forbes Montgomery would never settle for leftovers.

But she came back, with her flaming red hair and her designer shoes. Before he knew her, he'd only half-jokingly called her Satan, like his friends did. The joke had been on him. How karmic, that Satan herself would have such enthralling red hair, and that he would spend his days besides her struggling for air, encircled by fire. They sank slowly into her bed, hands entwined, eyes searching eyes, as Karma giggled.

He watched her almost shyly, tangling that shimmering hair around his fingers as it singed his hands. He'd never understand why he was so drawn to her hair, which billowed across his arms like a raging inferno. He'd never understand why she came back for him, when she could have had anybody. He knew that he was playing with fire, and that fire left vicious, sometimes fatal scars, and that he might have hell to pay. But the truth was, even survival was sometimes overrated. He pressed his lips to hers, renewing their kiss, and closed his eyes as he descended into the flames.


End file.
